Pokemon Crystal Draft Series #1: Picking your starter

Hello, everyone!  I'm writing a series of blog posts to give tips to players in our Pokemon Crystal Draft.  The focus of this guide will be the first round of the draft, in which each player picks their starter.

In many ways, one's starter will determine the type of game the player will play, and certain starters can drastically change the difficulty of the run.  For this discussion, we will break them up into 4 categories: burn, beatdown, buildup, and borrower.  We'll start with the burn starters: Pidgey, Growlithe, and Spearow.

Destroyer of worlds.

Burn starters are given their name because they have the capacity to "burn" through the early portion of the game at lightning speed, giving the player a massive time advantage to work with in the process.  They all have super-effective attacks against the first two gyms and relatively good stats to back them up.  They are also relatively easy to find, with only Growlithe putting up any resistance to being caught.  However, the most important quality they possess is that they are capable of getting all the way to Goldenrod City without ever fighting a single wild Pokemon.  This is what makes them so strong; with no grinding in the early portion of the game, players with a burn starter can wind up a good 15-20 minutes ahead of their competition without much effort.

Of course, they aren't perfect.  Growlithe requires a Fire Stone for evolution, which (except for exceedingly lucky players) will require a trip back to New Bark Town.  Pidgey and Spearow are weak at various points throughout the midgame before hitting key points in their leveling for evolutions and certain moves.  All three are completely destroyed by Whitney's Miltank.  They absolutely require that the 2nd or 3rd round pick is a dedicated Whitney-killer.

Overall, the tremendous free advantage given by these three puts them at the top of the tier list.  Pidgey beats out Growlithe due to its added utility as a Pokemon that can use Fly, and Spearow is naturally a bit weaker than the other two, but they are all excellent starters for the first three draft players.

Now that we've explored burn starters, let's go over beatdown starters.  Beatdown starters play similarly to burn starters, with two key differences: they don't take advantage of super-effective moves, and they are not stopped by Whitney.  The beatdown starters are Rattata, Sentret, Teddiursa, and Dunsparce.

"Crystal is full of derps, and Dunsparce is the KING of derps."  -- Brandon Noland

Beatdown starters, like their burn counterparts, do not need to fight wild Pokemon.  Sprout Tower powers them up enough to handle the Violet City Gym, and from there everything is downhill.  These Pokemon all possess raw power and rely on outputting more damage than the enemy gym leaders can with powerful STAB attacks.  Rattata embodies this concept the best, as it gets an extremely early killing move in the form of Hyper Fang.  With 80 base power (120 due to STAB), Rattata will be 2HKOing most enemies.  Teddiursa and Sentret rely on the slightly weaker Swift, while Dunsparce uses the conditionally weaker (and conditionally STRONGER) Rage.

They do have their drawbacks, though.  Every one of them besides Teddiursa requires the use of Mud-Slap to get past the Rival battle in Azalea Town.  Teddiursa is also the only one who gets stronger as the game goes on, although Dunsparce transitions from a sweeping role to a utility role.  Also, while they are capable of sweeping the first three gyms solo (and possibly even the fourth), they are incredibly risky against Chuck and nearly worthless against Jasmine.

Otherwise, beatdown starters are definitely great picks at any stage of the draft.  Their ability to handle the first three gyms on their own allows beatdown players to keep pace with burn players, and also allows them to effectively draft one round ahead of where they are due to the lack of a need for a Whitney-killer.  I highly recommend these starters to those picking 10th, 9th, 8th, and possibly even 7th.  They pair very well with some of the top-tier second round picks to provide solid coverage of every gym besides Blackthorn, allowing some flexibility in the remaining picks of these players.

The third type of starter is the buildup starter.  There are actually only two of these: Poliwag and Phanpy.  These starters are notable for their relatively slow start but immensely powerful lategame.  Both must grind against wild Pokemon to level up enough to face Falkner, as Sprout Tower is suicide.  Both must be paired with a Pokemon that can be caught no later than Ilex Forest, or else they will wipe at the Rival battle in Azalea Town.  Both also have solid offensive and defensive stats, with a reasonable moveset that continuously makes them stronger as the game goes on.

The two fill very odd roles in their teams as well.  Phanpy is a respectable Whitney-killer due to its resistance to Rock and high natural defense.  Poliwag clinches a Water-type for the player, as well as someone with a non-Blizzard Ice-type attack (specifically Ice Punch) and useable Fighting-type moves.  They allow teams greater flexibility, as they fill roles not normally taken by starters.  Beware their slow starts, however; these are not Pokemon for novice draft players.

Lastly, there are borrower starters.  These starters bear similarities to a few of the other roles but don't cleanly fit into any of them.  The borrower starters are Zubat, Geodude, Onix, and Hoothoot.

The epitome of mediocrity.

Borrower starters are generally more on the mediocre side.  They shine at certain points in the game, but fall flat at all others.  Zubat notably stays fairly strong and is actually quite useful lategame, but otherwise these starters all fall off in usefulness after Morty.

To elaborate on the meaning behind their name, borrower starters do portions of the job done by other classes of starters, but they always do it in a worse way.  Onix and Geodude destroy the first two gyms with super-effective moves, but they can't level up in Sprout Tower.  This forces them to grind.  Despite being able to handle Whitney with relative ease, their lack of evolution in the draft causes them to fall of hard after Whitney, and extremely hard after Morty.  They are decent at tanking Selfdestructs and picking off Koffings against Team Rocket, but that's about it.

Hoothoot plays similarly to the burn starters early on, but it falls behind even before beating Bugsy.  Hoothoot's stats are terrible for the purpose it is intended to serve, and the fact that it has a terrible movepool for midgame and lategame drive it further down.  It has team utility in the form of the ability to use Fly, but it generally isn't a worthwhile fighter to continue training.

Lastly, Zubat.  Zubat has a fairly good movepool and can handle various gym leaders with ease.  It also gets VERY strong by the time the player reaches the Elite Four, but getting it started takes a good amount of effort.  Despite being able to level up nearly for free in Sprout Tower, Zubat's low damage output combined with Leech Life's low PP means that multiple Pokemon Center trips will be required, and Zubat may not be able to finish off all of its opponent's Pokemon before running out of PP.  It should also be noted that it can learn Fly once it evolves into Crobat.

Anyway, that's the end of my ramblings on the starter Pokemon.  There were many Pokemon I didn't mention in this post, such as Gastly, Spinarak, Ledyba, Weedle, Caterpie, Unown, Bellsprout, and Hoppip.  The reason for this is because these Pokemon are absolutely terrible starters.  With the exception of Butterfree, all of them need to be close to level 20 (if not higher) to win against Falkner.  Beedrill can do it at lower levels, but Fury Attack is inaccurate and likely to get it killed.  This is further compounded by the fact that none of them ever get any better.  Gastly is complete and utter garbage until it learns Dream Eater, and even then it must hit with Hypnosis first.  Spinarak also learns Psychic...but not until extremely late, and if it is allowed to evolve, it can't learn it at all due to the level cap.

So there you have it, folks.  I'll be making two more posts concerning team building and how to properly use one's team in the actual draft, so stay tuned!